A young woman described to a jury how she was groomed and sexually abused by a Portslade barman as an underage teen.
John Guile, 48, is charged with a string of serious sex attacks on two victims, one from the age of 13, and the other from the age of 11, all of which he denies.
Yesterday, a jury at Brighton Crown Court was played a video interview with the older victim, who is now in her 20s.
She said she had often felt uncomfortable and confused during her encounters with Guile, who was then known as John Gosling.
But it was only later, when she told them what had happened, that she realised she had been groomed and sexually assaulted.
She said she had met Guile when he was working behind the bar at a pub her parents were regulars at, when he would have been in his late 30s.
She said: “I didn’t know what groomed word meant at the age of 13. It’s not until I got older and told family members that they told me that’s grooming and I think in a way it was. He would speak to me online and what he did to me when we met up.
“He would say explicit things that he wanted to do to me, that he wanted to have sex to me.
“It made me feel uncomfortable. Part of me knew it wasn’t right but another part still wanted to meet him.
“I couldn’t tell you why I wanted to meet him at that age, but I did. I found the idea of meeting up with him really exciting.”
She added: “Every time we met, sexual things did happen.
“When we first started meeting I would meet him at a pub he used to work at and he had his own room there.
“He would be behind the bar and he would tell his colleagues that I was his daughter and he would take me upstairs.
“He lived in a flat on the Old Shoreham Road where he had a flatshare with another man. I only went there twice when the man he was living there with wasn’t there.
“The other time it took place at the skate park in Southwick.
“We arranged to meet on a bus which went into Brighton centre for the day and got off at Churchill Square and I saw my step dad and step sister across the road staring directly at me.
“A few hours later I had loads of missed calls and texts from both of them asking who I was with, but I completely denied it because I was worried that I was going to get him in some sort of trouble.
“We went to Brighton Pier and he took me to a pub and we stayed there for a few hours. He knew the bar staff and told them I was his daughter.”
Guile, of Abinger Road, Portslade, is charged with four serious sexual attacks on the girl at the Romans Pub in Southwick which took place on two separate occasions, three serious sexual attacks in Brighton which took place in Brighton and one serious sexual assault in Portslade, all of which took place from 2009 to 2011.
He no longer works at the Romans Pub, which is under new management.
He’s also charged with a serious sexual assault on 11-year-old girl in 2017 and two more serious sexual assaults on the same girl when she was 13, all in Brighton.
He denies the charges. The trial continues.
